Dallas police recently began detailed tracking of incidents in which officers have to use force to fight back against resisting suspects.

Starting Jan. 1, the department began requiring that officers electronically fill out forms that allow the department to compile data for use in identifying crime trends or areas where training needs to be improved, police say.

Using drop-down menus, Dallas police are now required to document any force that they used beyond simply handcuffing a suspect, as well as any resistance from the suspect. They’ll also write a short narrative about the incident.

Similar systems are already being used by many major police departments, including Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin. Fort Worth launched its system about a month ago, and Houston is putting a system in place.

“This is something that is a best practice across the country,” said Dallas police Deputy Chief Christina Smith, who is overseeing the project as head of the department’s internal affairs division. “It will give us a good idea of what the trends are and help us better train officers.”

The change is among a slew of policies and directives that Police Chief David Brown announced in August within weeks after an officer fatally shot a suspected South Dallas drug dealer.

The shooting nearly touched off a riot in the Dixon Circle neighborhood where it occurred and led to a public outcry from community activists upset about a string of police-involved shootings.

With fatalities resulting from at least 10 of Dallas’ 20-plus shootings involving officers, the city recorded its deadliest year for such incidents since 2002. Eight fatalities involved armed suspects.

In an interview shortly after the announcement, Brown said other departments had been forced to better track use of force issues because of federal mandates, and he believed it was better to do so voluntarily.

“I just think it’s smart to be able to look at yourself introspectively and be able to make the appropriate changes,” the chief said then.

Officers previously only documented the use of a Taser and pepper balls on special forms that were later manually entered into a trackable database. Other types of force were typically documented in the narrative portion of an officer’s arrest report, making it virtually impossible for supervisors to easily track the force used by officers and the physical threats officers confront.

Robert Kaminski, an associate criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who has also studied police use of force issues, said policing agencies are increasingly using robust computerized systems to record what’s known in policing circles as “response to resistance.”

“It’s very important for agencies to know how much force is being used, when it’s being used, what’s the magnitude, as well as to know the threats that officers are facing from suspects,” Kaminski said.

But he added that it’s important for departments to look at the information in context.

“You can’t just look at the data blindly,” he said. “If an officer gets flagged for a certain number of uses of force incidents in a certain period of time, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It could just mean that it’s a young officer with a high arrest rate and the more people you arrest, there’s going to be more force used.”

Austin produces an annual use of force report from the information reported by their officers. But their system also flags officers who may be using force at a greater level than their peers.

“We catch them really early,” said Austin Assistant Chief Brian Manley. “You’re not finding out about an officer who’s got a significant problem. You’ve identified them really early on and hopefully before they have a career-ending problem.”

In Dallas, supervisors will review the reports, but police officials say they do not plan to use the system to automatically monitor officers for the number of times they individually use force. They do plan to use the information if complaints arise about an officer.

“It’s not going to be something that’s used to generate investigations against officers,” said Smith, the Dallas deputy chief in charge of the project. “It’s really for us just to see what the trends are.”

But Ron Pinkston, president of the Dallas Police Association, is wary about how the system will be used because it’s been set up to track use of force by individual officers. He worries that officers, for example, will be unfairly compared against those who patrol lower-crime areas.

“Our fear is that in the future that it will be used against officers, either by a defense attorney, the media or by future chiefs,” Pinkston said. “In Las Vegas, their department uses it in a negative way, where I’ve talked to Phoenix and their officers are very happy with how it’s being used.”

Sgt. Steve Hall, president of the Fort Worth Police Officers Association, said he has not received any complaints yet from officers, but he shares Pinkston’s concerns.

“Everybody’s got an interest in maintaining the public trust and making sure that we provide good quality service,” Hall said. “What we don’t want is a system that’s used to arbitrarily identify people … based on some standard that’s just picked out of the air.”

In Houston, where a police spokesman said their conversion is in the early stages, Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, said police commanders told him “in their conversations with the Department of Justice that they were asked, ‘How many cases of force had been used?’ and we weren’t able to report that. Therefore, the chief decided he wanted some type of system in place.”

Hunt said he worries that the information could give “ammunition to defense attorneys to say you’ve got a rogue cop out there, where in fact the type of calls that they’re dealing with is dictating the force that’s being used.”

But the experience of Phoenix does show that it doesn’t have to be a net negative for officers.

“It’s not really been much of an issue over here,” said Joe Clure, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association. “We had apprehensions about it, that folks were going to use it to say, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ and what have you. But it’s turned out to not be so.”